Mad to the bone: learning outcomes of critical grief pedagogy

Abstract

We outline critical grief pedagogy as a Mad feminist response to the silencing of loss that often occurs in academic spaces. This pedagogical framework creates openings for students to "break open the bone" of their own and others' losses, particularly through community-engaged learning and research. Using collaborative autoethnography, in this essay we (a professor and her mentees) explore our experiences working with the Scraps of the Heart Project-a community-based research collective focused on empowering families following the loss of a baby-to understand student learning outcomes that were born from our engagement with critical grief pedagogy. Our collective narratives revealed that these learnings included: gaining compassionate communication skills, embracing and unpacking failure as a method of mourning, becoming empowered and empowering others to share their stories of loss, and building a community of Mad grievers. We put these learning outcomes into conversation with cultural discourses surrounding pedagogical and academic norms. Additionally, we offer insight into how loss and mourning can be invited into the classroom so that students learn to engage grief critically, meaningfully, and Madly-and to learn important communicative skills along the way.

Anti transcarceral grief pedagogy for pandemic times

“…They are what force educators to compartmentalize their grief into sanitized and easily digestible sentiments of grief with a focus on returning to normalcy (Granek, 2013). They are what regulates grief responses, duration, and appropriateness, marking that which falls outside of established (white) norms around grief as pathological (Granek, 2008;Poole & Galvan, 2021;Willer et al, 2021). We agree with Moore (2016) who notes that the effects of this epistemological silencing are also damaging to students, who are not able to benefit from transformative, teachable moments that arise out of authentic (and sometimes messy) engagement with grief in the classroom.…”

“…Though some my personal and professional work has focused on how my experiences with infertility, miscarriage, and the death of my son have shaped the ways that I have faced grief as a professor (Willer, 2019;Willer et al, 2021), more recently I cannot help but recognize that I was a grieving learner long before I was a grieving teacher. Below I tell one of the stories of how I faced grief as a middle schooler in the United States.…”

“…It has also offered up important spaces of 'maybe-ing,' and 'by this, we mean sustaining spaces of possibility; of pushing at the boundaries not only of what IS, but also of what is thinkable, knowable, and doable; of imagining how things can be otherwise' (Mahon et al, 2020, p. 1). As we detail in this piece and as we attempt to be grief-facing (Poole & Galvan, 2021;Poole & Ward, 2013;Willer, 2019;Willer et al, 2021), examining and re-imagining how we teach with grief now is particularly pressing.…”

“…Even before COVID-19 times, we began working toward a grief-facing approach to teaching/learning called critical grief pedagogy, which was/is grounded in four tenets (Willer, in press;Willer et al, 2021). The first calls for the demedicalization of grief in the classroom, recognizing that mourning cannot always be tidied up quickly and quietly.…”

“…Second, critical grief pedagogy acknowledges that grief's unruliness is not a bio-deterministic issue internal to a griever, but rather a result of systems of power such as white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and neoliberalism, for example, that affect and reflect rules for grieving. Third and fourth, critical grief pedagogy calls instructors and learners to respond to these injustices by making space for embodied witnessing of grief in the classroom and practicing compassion in response (Willer, in press;Willer et al, 2021).…”